A/N: The fun never stops on the Gutierrez train. Suddenly there's a sister involved. Hang in there, Gravepainters. This too shall pass. :)

Nothing belongs to me. All credit goes to the insurmountably talented (and devastatingly cruel) Jorge Gutierrez and his producer Guillermo del Toro, along with all the fantastic artists—including Ron Perlman and Kate de Castillo—who made this idle driveling of mine possible. Soundtrack: "Wicked Game" – James Vincent McMorrow.

1. Seeds

"Dreadful, isn't it?"

Shocked out of his own thoughts, Xibalba blinked owlishly first into the flickering green fireplace and then up at the voice who had spoken from the shadows behind his armchair. The shape was a black silhouette against the light, its features indistinguishable, but its eyes were glimmering a sickly, greedy yellow, the pupils hard slits inside as though someone had cut them open with a knife. A pointed, sharp smile carved its way across the face, shining eerily white in the darkness.

Unimpressed and irritated to have been drawn so unwillingly from the comfort of his own mind, Xibalba turned his attention back to the fire and steepled his fingers once more. "What a delightful surprise, Eris. I didn't think you were coming."

Pouting, the goddess of chaos slid smokelike into the plum-colored chair across from his, arranging herself like a lazy cat on its plush cushion. "Come now, Xibalba, the annual Calacas Ball? And the first time you've hosted in five hundred years, the first time since you married, of all things?" She offered him a positively poisonous smile. "How could I miss it?"

"Allow me to correct myself. I didn't think you were invited."

Unflustered, she smirked at him in a very self-satisfied way. "Of course I was invited. You should have known La Muerte would invite me."

He scowled darkly into the flames. "I didn't think this was your sort of thing."

"Oh, I always enjoy myself at these petty little functions," she said, arranging her midnight-colored chiton with long, ashen fingers. Her skin was as scaly and shiny as a snake's. "How rare it is to see us all gathered together for any reason barring an apocalyptic catastrophe. Or, Ancients forbid, another war. That Troy disaster? Disgraceful."

"Delicious, you mean?" Xibalba cocked one snowy eyebrow, gazing at her tiredly. Go away. Please. Annoy someone else with your nonsensical driveling. "Hades was only too quick to inform me that you were in fact the one who started it, flinging that apple into the midst of three egotistical goddesses as though you didn't know what would happen."

At least she had the grace to not deny it with excuses, blusters or stammerings. She smiled wider, showing off her fangs, and idly stretched her coal-black bat wings.

"What can I say," she simpered. "Chaos. Now, that's my sort of thing."

To say the least. Xibalba scoffed sardonically, returning his gaze to the fire. Everyone above or underworld knew Eris was one of the most powerful goddesses in all the realms; and one of the most dangerous. And she would only grow stronger. Since the beginning of time, since the universe itself had exploded out into the abyss, spiraling outward in waves of energy, the neat, tight order that had bounded all things in one, uncomplicated shell had begun to dissipate into stars and galaxies that intertwined with each other even as they shot unhindered into the blackness. Everything had been fracturing from the start. And it would always be fracturing until finally matter was too scattered to be considered anything at all, and everything would fade back into oblivion.

Eris' power, the sheer power of chaos, was the one power that would always exist as long as there was time to run out and space to widen. She frightened even the most powerful of the deities. And she reveled in it.

"Your wife is very beautiful," she said.

When he looked up from the fire he saw that Eris' eyes were fixated on a point on the open floor where the multitude of colorful gods and goddesses of all shapes and sizes churned in mingling and conversation. He followed her gaze. There, directly in the middle of it all chatting animatedly with the helmeted Viking Freyja, was a tall, beautiful woman in a red dress and a massive sombrero, ebony hair tumbling in luscious curls down her back and yellow marigolds adorning every available inch of her body. Her eyes were flickering with some unseen light, the same light alive in her candles, and her white cheeks were flushed with excitement from the gala. She was in her element.

Xibalba's heart clenched painfully. Slowly, he returned his gaze to the fire, summoned a goblet of wine with a wisp of thick black smoke, and drained it in one vicious gulp before promptly filling it again. Eris, pretending not to notice, continued.

"I'll admit, I was thoroughly stunned when your marriage was announced," she commented, casually honest. But he didn't miss the glance she shot him, the little quirk at the corner of her mouth that meant she was thinking venemous thoughts. "But even more so by how long you two had kept it hidden from the rest of us. Why, I wonder? Were you worried of what we would think, what we would say? Oh, come now, Xibalba, what's the worst that could happen? Maybe she is a little too young for you, certainly. Or perhaps a little too vivacious, impassioned, what's the word—lively?"

"Silence, Eris!" he hissed, his teeth sharpening to deadly points and his candles blazing like torches. Each word was a dagger in his chest, and the little nicks and cuts that had begun to appear since the day he fell for La Muerte were widening, beginning to bleed in earnest. "You know not of what you speak."

But she merely lapped up his anger like warm milk, and her eyes seethed with delight. "Such hostility. Uncharacteristic of you. After all, what would it matter what the rest of us thought?"

His hands were strangling his staff. He refused to meet her eyes. But even so, he could hear the smile stretch across her lips.

"Unless, of course, you believed them yourself?"

Without another word he rose, his wings trembling and spread as though to smother her of their own volition, and he pivoted, fully intending to sweep from the fireplace and thus end this conversation once and for all, this dialogue that was dredging up something far more black and loathsome than tar from the back of his mind, something that had been sitting there festering for centuries, quietly brewing with the beginnings of vicious life but refusing to stir. Until now.

"I wouldn't blame you, of course," she said quickly. He paused, if only out of politeness. One simply couldn't walk away from Eris when she was speaking. He felt her rise behind him, slip through his feathers in a wisp of smoke before appearing at his side, wearing her perpetual smirk as they both watched his wife work the crowd. "Just look at her. She could have her pick of any god, any mortal that she wanted."

Her eyes fell on him like embers. "So why in the name of the Ancients would she choose you?"

The candles were torches on his shoulders, and he was growing increasingly weary of this conversation. Or any potential conversations with Eris in the future. He relished the idea of vanishing her to the innermost depths of the Land of the Forgotten, allowing her to become intimately acquainted with the particularly gruesome horrors they housed. Some things, after all, were better left forgotten.

Instead, he flashed her a pointy smile. "I suppose she likes my charm."

Eris sneered. "Oh, no, it's much worse than that. I think she in fact loves you, Xibalba, bless her dulce-de-leche heart. In spite of it all."

And in spite of him, Xibalba felt his breathing stop and his own heart stutter at her words. Part of him still couldn't believe it, looking at La Muerte now, across a crowded hall, the way her eyes shone and how the crystals of her skin caught the light and refracted it across the lucky face of whoever she was speaking to. She loved him. She loved him. He smiled helplessly, truly, and leaned against the staff for balance, his knees suddenly buckling. She was captivating. Spectacular. He was the one with wings, yet he was fairly certain that nothing came closer to heaven than his wife. His wife.

"The poor darling." Beside him, Eris heaved the heaviest of sighs. "She doesn't know you like I do, after all."

All the warmth fled from his body like a frost descending suddenly on springtime. He snarled. "You don't know me at all."

"Oh, but I do," she smirked. Her eyes glimmered evilly, and with a possessive, merciless air, she reached out a long clawed finger and stroked a line of fire down one of his feathers. "I really do, ever so intimately."

Where once, many eons ago, the very same sensation would have pierced Xibalba's core with a sudden, insurmountable desire to have the goddess as close to him as was physically possible, surrounding him, within him, now he only felt utter disgust. He ripped his wing from her grasp like she'd burned him, and whirled, catching the offending wrist in a vicelike grip.

"Never touch me again," he seethed, his words less a warning than a promise of sheer, unadulterated pain. "That was a long time ago, Eris, and I have never regretted anything so much in my life as the time we spent together."

She grinned. "One of your many regrets, I'm sure. Or must I remind you of your several other, ah, regretful encounters with some other goddesses we know? You haven't forgotten, have you?"

"As I said," he muttered, moving away from the fireplace to the high, stone window that overlooked the Land of the Forgotten. "That was a long time ago."

Eris, like a persistent disease, followed, and in the pale grey light from outside, her eyes shone like a pair of yellow stones and the scales of her skin shimmered with a sort of malicious pearlescence. "A very long time ago."

He bristled. They had all been much younger then, the universe so new and filled with promise. He hadn't been quite so bitter and the world hadn't seemed quite so cold, and he was charming and quick and filled with fire. And then, suddenly, there had been La Muerte. And there had been no one since.

And yet…

"Love does change, Xibalba," Eris said at his side. "For some it ripens with time, while for others it tends to, unfortunately, fade." From anyone else, the words would have sounded wise; but from Eris' silky voice, they were tainted by poison and by the way her fangs glittered threateningly in the light. "You have been married a long time, together for longer. And, given your situation, I mean, surely you're aware of how very different you are? How beautiful, sweet, kind, loving she is? The archetypal opposite of you? It's incredible that your marriage has lasted even this long."

She glanced at him, and he didn't doubt for a moment she could see him trembling. She delivered the final blow with precision and poise.

"You don't deserve her."

"Eris, are you bothering my husband?"

Both gods turned from the window, and Xibalba blinked in the sudden darkness of the party compared with the glaring steel color of the Land of the Forgotten. La Muerte, in the candlelight from the colored lanterns, was resplendent. Her skin was as white as snow, her dress immaculate and her marigolds unruffled, and her red lips were stretched into a warm, loving smile.

The speed at which Eris' caustic smirk transformed into a cheerful grin was truly astonishing and simultaneously frightening.

"Just a little bit, sugarheart," the goddess laughed lightly, idly patting Xibalba's arm. He stiffened. "After all, if you can't share your husband with your sister every once in a while, who can you share him with?"

La Muerte beamed. "In any case, if you two wallflowers are through being antisocial, I truly would appreciate it if you graced the rest of us with your presence. There are churros to be eaten and gods to be regaled. Especially by you, hermanita, everyone knows you're the best dancer of all of us."

Eris mocked a curtsy, smiling. "As my queen commands." She disappeared in a spidery wisp of smoke, and over La Muerte's shoulder Xibalba watched her reappear in the arms of a stunned Osiris. Deftly, she whirled him out onto the dance floor to the laughing delight of several other deities, who quickly found partners and joined them to the pulse of the music.

Smiling, La Muerte shook her head. "Incorrigible. But what can you do? Little sisters must be loved, after all."

But when Xibalba didn't answer with a characteristically snide comment or quip, the laughter died in his wife's throat. She looked at his face and, when that revealed nothing, she took his arm. "Xibalba? What is it? Is something the matter?"

For one, brief, insane moment, Xibalba turned to her, looked in her eyes, and opened his mouth to tell her exactly what was the matter. To ask her to tell him she loved him again, just once, just to make sure she still did and that it hadn't faded between them like a wilting flower. To ask her to tell him that, like every couple, they had good days and bad days, and even though most of their days seemed like bad ones lately, that everything was going to be alright, that this was a phase that they could work through together. To ask her to tell him that together their differences created one person, one whole, and without them they would both be mere shadows of themselves, torn and incomplete.

But the seed that Eris had planted in the back of his mind, in that deep, dark place where that creature was stirring, was already beginning to sprout and work its magic.

She couldn't love him. Impossible. She was wise, loving, beautiful, and the most wonderful person he had ever had the misfortune to meet, and he had fallen so hard and so fast for her that the thought of living without her had been inescapably painful. He had never felt this way about anyone. He had never loved anything so much in his life. And so he had charmed her and wagered her and maneuvered her into a place that resembled for all intents and purposes the very zenith of love, and by cheating his way into her heart, only then had she consented to marry him. No, he was certain that La Muerte had long since realized that marrying him was the most tragic mistake of her immortal life.

And so, rather than listen to the lie she would tell when he begged her to just once more say that she loved him, he clamped his mouth shut and smiled.

"Nothing, mi amor," he soothed her, offering his arm and guiding her to the dance floor. Her answering smile pierced him through and through. "What could be wrong when I'm with you?"

A/N: Wanted to take a leaf from A. Kingsleigh's book and upload this the day after, but I'm just not that talented. :) And Iknow, I know, I didn't want to make Eris the sister either, I would have preferred some other Aztec goddess of fertility/life/something. Ah, well. Another time, another fic.